It’s that time of year. Here comes the “New Year, New You article!”
You’ve been back in the office for a few days. Christmas is a distant memory, New years resolutions have been made (and maybe even broken), your gym membership has restarted with very good intentions to attend regularly…it’s going to be a great year.
So you’ve made some resolutions for yourself. What about your business?
The beginning of the year is a perfect time to review what you currently have in place. There are so many tools to help you work smarter and help you work as productively as possible for the year ahead.
Here are some tips to get your business in shape for 2017:
1. Get current and immediately cut business expenses
It’s not often you can cut costs and get the latest technology whilst doing so. Get current with hosted services, which work through the cloud. They’re definitely the key to creating a more flexible working environment as well as helping to cut business expenses substantially by removing unnecessary hardware expenses.
2. Improve employee and customer satisfaction with flexible working
Hosted services mean you are more contactable and have access to files whilst on the go or when working from home. This can be an invaluable asset to increase customer satisfaction whilst on the go and help to improve employee productivity when working out of the office.
3. Use one provider for your Calls, Lines & Mobiles
Wouldn’t it be easier to get all of your network services on one bill? It makes sense to consolidate all of your incoming services to make it easier to manage and analyse from one bill when you need to. Having one point of contact can also make it easier to solve any problems quicker.
4. Collaborate with customers and suppliers more cost effectively
Have you thought of having virtual meetings rather than travelling to customer’s premises? Sometimes a face to face meeting is essential however virtual meetings are an excellent way of getting people from multiple locations together to discuss various projects and even edit documents between the group.
5. Make sure you have a disaster recovery plan in place
This is usually something people will get round to doing “one day”. That “one day” needs to be today! Imagine the effect it would have on your business if you lost all of your valuable data such as customer database, important documents etc. But you have them backed up on hardware I hear you say…how often have you checked to see whether these are ok…what if there was a fire and the hardware is no longer there? It sounds a bit extreme – but you never know. This is why using the cloud to back up is a no- brainer (we think so anyway). You can access your data from anywhere in the event of a disaster so your business can carry on as it were.
We hope these 5 tips have helped you think about how you can improve your business this year. If there anything you would like more information on feel free to contact one of our team who would be happy to help.
